devopsdays Chicago 2020

Jason: [00:00:00] With the Yak and with DevOps Deep Thoughts, everything else, it was very much DevOps Days Chicago.

Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Matt Stratton.

Trevor: I’m Trevor Hess.

Matty: This episode is sponsored by CircleCI, designed for modern software teams. Teams, CircleCI’s continuous integration and delivery platform helps developers push code with confidence. Trusted by thousands of companies, from 4-person startups to Fortune 500 businesses, CircleCI helps teams take their software from idea to delivery quickly, safely, and at scale. Visit arresteddevops.com/circleci to learn why high-performing DevOps teams use CircleCI to automate and accelerate their CI/CD pipelines. Today, we are talking to attendees, participants, organizers, speakers, all sorts of folks who were involved in this year’s DevOps Days Chicago, which was also the first ever virtual DevOps Days Chicago. We’re going to talk to some folks to see what they thought about it, and primarily thinking about the virtual experience of that, because this is really new to a lot of us, and we’re all trying to do it really, really well, or at least not terribly. Keeping that in mind, We’ve got a whole bunch of guests, so we’re just going to have everybody go around, introduce themselves, and then we’re going to go get right into it.

Kevin: [00:01:42] Hey, everybody. My name is Kevin Reedy. I’m a technical account manager at Kong, not the dog toy company. I feel like I always need to tell everybody that because it’s impossible to Google, much like other companies I’ve worked for in the past. I ran the AV team at DevOps Day Chicago this year and pretty much every year that we’ve needed an AV team. And one fun fact is I’m currently the 20th ranked shuffleboard player in the world.

Sasha: Oh, man, that’s hard to follow. So I’m Sasha. I have been part of DevOps Days Chicago for the last 5 or 6 years. I don’t know. Um, what is time? And, uh, I’m very invested in making t-shirts and making the conference a great experience for everybody.

Jason: Hey everyone. I’m Jason Yee. I’m Director of Advocacy at Gremlin. I don’t know that I’m 20th anything in the world. I might be the 20th Jason Yee, ’cause my name is actually fairly common. Um, Number one would be apparently there’s a Jason Yee who’s like a kung fu master, and I kind of wish that I was him. But instead, I make chocolate in my spare time.

Kat: [00:02:44] I love chocolate, but I’m not good at making it. My name is Kat Cosgrove, and I’m a developer advocate at JFrog. If we’re doing fun facts and/or competitive facts, I used to play Dance Dance Revolution competitively, and I have won the World Barbecue Cooking Championships.

Laura: I’m Laura Santamaria. I’m a Developer Advocate at LogDNA, and unlike everybody else, I’m not that funny. I mostly talk about the most boring thing in the world, which is logs. But I’m here in Austin. I do Austin DevOps and a bunch of things, and I gave an Ignite at DevOps Days Chicago.

Chris: Last and least, I’m Chris Read. I’ve just started a new position at a company called Aquatic Capital Management here in Chicago. I have been involved in DevOps Days since the very first one in Ghent, where I had the pleasure of speaking. I helped organize a few of the London DevOps Days before moving here to Chicago, where I met Matt, and he was looking for people to help organize DevOps Days Chicago, and I’ve been involved in one way or another ever since. And so I was involved on the virtual team in this year’s event.

Matty: [00:03:52] Fantastic. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about— not too much about the history of DevOps Days Chicago. I think we kind of know about DevOps Days Chicago has been around since 2014, which is still funny to me to think about that we’re one of the longer-running events, and we’ve been around for the majority of the time there’s been DevOpsDays, because it still feels new to me. But yeah, Chris and Kevin and I were among the folks who helped kick off the first one. Sasha came and joined us the next year, and we brought Trevor along eventually. But that’s enough about that. I want to talk a little bit about what was different this year. To kind of put in perspective, we didn’t initially plan to make this be a virtual event, but as things started to happen with COVID and coronavirus, we started looking and said, What are things gonna look like? Is it possible that come September we’re gonna actually be able to get people in a room together? We were cautiously optimistic, and then we kind of— except for me, except for Sasha. Sasha was probably telling us from the beginning that we were all a bunch of Pollyannas. But, you know, but that being said, Sasha, you kind of, I think, were leading the charge to actually try to do this thing virtually. I think a lot of us were kind of like, maybe it’s better to you know, just, just, you know, kind of punt for the year. That’s my only sports analogy that’ll make it into the whole show. And Sasha really kind of helped rally that. So Sasha, you want to talk a little bit about how we made this decision and what was important to us in deciding to just put on a virtual event?

Sasha: [00:05:30] Yeah, so first of all, my general strategy is convince Matt that we should do something and then have him do it. So that works out really well for me. But yeah, I did sort of, I did push for us to have a virtual event. My biggest thing was if we didn’t, I was kind of afraid that that community that we have come together every year would have no place to come and discuss their lives and their technology problems and innovation and whatnot. So I wanted to have that place. And so the biggest question I think for us was, can we make it a good virtual experience where people can still have a conversation? And not just be attendees to a talk, right? And so ironically, I think me and Matt actually have no idea how that part went, even though we really, really tried to make it good because we were part of the— like, so we split the event into AV team, I guess, and a virtual team, right? And so the people who were in the studio were just in the studio and kind of recording the thing, and the other people were handling the participation. So, I think Chris is the only person from the virtual team here, so he’ll have to speak to that. But yeah, and so I will say the other thing is that was important to me in particular was that we make the event free, so anybody could go and attend and anybody could watch the things for the talks for free on YouTube. I think since we could afford it, I think it would be a mistake not to do that.

Matty: [00:07:11] I want to kind of reiterate what Sasha said about having a good virtual experience. Something that’s been key of our particular DevOpsDays— it’s true of a lot of DevOpsDays, but it’s part of our philosophy, and I think it might have started at the second year, I don’t know— Michael Lanyon, who is one of our organizers, kind of decided to say some spiel up on stage about, look at your badge, it says participant. Everybody’s a participant. This is a participant conference. Landon was just kind of riffing, but that really became part of our core belief about what DevOps Days Chicago is. One thing I want to kind of talk about is when we were— we took about 3 to 4 weeks, I would say, to decide, were we going to try to do a virtual conference? We said, we’re going to spend some time deliberating, and our focus was not around technology, not around what platform would we use or anything. We kept saying, take a step back, and what are the outcomes that we want to achieve? The reason I want to bring this up is because that’s so very DevOps, right? When we think about what DevOps is about, it’s about thinking about being outcome-driven rather than implementation-driven. It was one of those things where it was— and I’ll tell you, it’s a hard exercise to do because we’re engineers. We default back to, oh, but how would we do that in Slack? But how would we do that? Oh, there’s no platform that does that. And we kept saying, wait, let’s say what we want and what could this be like, and then we’ll figure out how we might achieve it. And we’ll talk a little bit about some of the implementation details in a minute, but I just wanna think about like, there’s a lot of talk around virtual events around, well, how do we replicate the hallway track? And I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is, what do you get out of the hallway track and how can you achieve that outcome? ’Cause saying, I want to replicate the hallway track, gets you a bunch of augmented reality VR expo booth nonsense that actually doesn’t accomplish— it accomplishes the feeling of walking around, but does it actually help? And it’s, yeah, so it’s thinking about outcomes, I think, is a really key part.

Sasha: [00:09:28] And I think I want to mention that we looked at a bunch of different virtual platforms and we essentially said no to all of them, right? Because they did not accomplish what we wanted to do, right? They had all sorts of virtual experiences geared towards some things, but they did not work for what we wanted.

Matty: We’re gonna go into talking a little bit about the AV, but just for some context, and Sasha alluded to this, when we streamed the event, we did stream from a studio, and we’ll talk about that in just a minute about how AV worked, but that was to Sasha’s point. We also had a whole other team that was really helping manage the virtual part.

Chris: Yeah, no, going back to what you said about the outcomes is it’s, that was, kind of one of my biggest concerns when we were like, do we cancel this conference or do we flip to virtual, was how do we make sure that we replicate that whole experience as close as possible so that at the end of the conference, those who took the time to come and join us both as participants and as speakers could feel that they got the value out of that time doing it. And yet selecting those platforms and going through the whole platform list was quite entertaining and frustrating at times.

Trevor: [00:10:41] So, with that, I’m going to pick on Kevin here, Mr. 20th best shuffleboard player in the world. Kevin, you said you’ve run AV for DevOps Days Chicago basically for its entire existence. What was that like, and how was it different for you to run this year?

Kevin: Well, what’s kind of nice about AV from the first DevOps Days was that we always were kind of just catching up with where we needed to be. So, that first year, we had terrible AV because nobody was really in charge of it, so we knew, okay, the next year, we need to make sure at least somebody’s thinking about this. And as we’ve kind of grown into larger and larger venues, we’ve kind of managed that upward both in terms of complexity and just making it loud enough and visually appealing, and people can see slides, all the way to things like how do we use AV to ensure anyone who wouldn’t necessarily be able to get the full experience out of a conference could, like by providing live captioning onto screens and things like that. So it’s always kind of just been like small iterations from year to year that have been somewhat obvious. The big difference this year is we pretty much threw that entire thing out the window. All I could tell you at the start when we’re like, all right, we’re going virtual, what are the things that are important? What are the outcomes we’re trying to get to? My number one was quality. I wanted to make sure both our in-studio presenters, and at the time we didn’t know if that would include our normal speakers and Ignite talks or not because we didn’t know where the world would be, would look really good and be intriguing and as interactive as we could be. Which led to some great decisions I’ll talk about in a little bit. And also, we knew that asking our presenters to travel, regardless of, you know, hey, what’s the world gonna look like on September 1st, not knowing, like, there’s definitely going to be some people who can’t or won’t travel, and that’s totally fine. So the kind of the big thing I put my foot down and said is we are not going to have remote presenters live over Zoom or similar, because it’s too hard to deliver that quality when you’re dealing with internet connections, audio, and even lighting. You know, a lot of people have really nice cameras, but to be honest with you, good lighting with a bad camera is probably going to look a lot better than the opposite there. So the big difference to me then is just we had to start from scratch, and AV was no longer an obvious thing of how to iterate from the previous year.

Trevor: [00:13:03] I wanted to jump in on one thing you said. Oh, I want to jump in on several things that you said there. How did you have insight into the quality issues that you might run into if you tried to have the speakers livestream?

Kevin: Just by seeing other virtual conferences that have already happened before, where you’ve got, you know, some of the early ones, especially when people would join, and the first thing they’d say is, all right, can everyone hear me? Right? And if they didn’t have the ability to hear back from their audience, it was like, okay, well, I guess nobody’s saying in the chat. And you’d see like the first 2 to 3 minutes of any talk without AV issues essentially be AV issues, and I felt like that could really drive participation downward. And if there are real issues, they’d be extremely hard to troubleshoot while the presenter is trying to present if they’re just at home or elsewhere having internet connections because somebody in their home just started another Zoom chat or something similar on the Wi-Fi.

Trevor: Absolutely. And you mentioned you had speakers from not just Chicago. So you said you’ve got a— we had a studio in Chicago, but how did you accommodate for these speakers who needed to record in other locations?

Kevin: [00:14:11] Yeah, so our kind of default ideal situation was we’re going to hire a local videographer with a studio, and if you as a presenter are comfortable going into one, we’re gonna take care of it all remotely for you. We pay for the studio time, gave those people recording a kind of set of guidelines on how we wanted to be shot with like 2 cameras, and then for consistency’s sake, we actually had our partner AV Chicago here in Chicago do all of the editing to try and bring some consistency, whether it was recorded in a studio that they ran or a studio out in Portland or someone self-recording at home. And then for those who were either uncomfortable recording at home, couldn’t find the time, or we couldn’t find a good local studio based on their geography, we actually put together a really good kind of self-recording guide, which I’ll let you speak to since you wrote 90% of it.

Trevor: Ooh, the reversal. So, yes, I was Kevin’s counterpart in AV crime, as we are in many things related to audiovisual things and shuffleboard. So, we basically put together a list based— a lot of it actually came from the experience I have done doing Arrested DevOps with Matt and Bridget and the rest of the crew. Knowing what things we need to look for from an audio quality perspective, pulling up guides from, you know, media schools and other things that had really detailed information about how to light yourself, where to sit, where not to sit, how to make sure that we’re being consistent about the— like Kevin said, the camera work and the positioning going into the recording so that folks could produce, even if they only had one camera, a decent experience of film or a decent video that fit into the experience that we were trying to produce and gave AV Chicago as much as they needed to work with. Kevin, if you wanna talk a little bit about how do we keep our other outcome? One of the other outcomes that we wanted to maintain was the ability to interact with the speaker.

Kevin: [00:16:26] Yeah, so that’s kind of the big trade-off of prerecording all of the talks, right? Is now that speaker is not necessarily feeding off of the audience if they have some way to do it, or more importantly, speaking to other presentations that happened earlier in the day. So what we did is after each talk, we had our breakout sessions, which I know we’re gonna talk about more later, but one of those breakout sessions, which was on our main YouTube stream, was like a Q&A or fireside chat with the presenter. And we did do that part live over Zoom, having the presenter come join early so we could test things like lighting, internet, audio, and make any adjustments we needed to while we didn’t have to worry about it being live. So that really gave us not quite the hallway track or the talking to a speaker immediately after their talk, but we gave them a way via Discord and the rest of our participant experience, a way to kind of funnel that feedback and questions back to our hosts in the studio, and I know Matt’s gonna talk a little bit about that later.

Trevor: [00:17:29] So, Kevin, the studio experience, what was that like? I mean, obviously, I was working with you on it, so I have a bit of context for myself, but working with AV Chicago was a delight.

Jason: It was.

Trevor: What was it like to get that set up? What was the studio experience like?

Kevin: Yeah, to be honest, going into it, we just knew it was gonna be some kind of nice studio with good audio, good lighting, and the ability to give good feedback to our live presenters with good cameras and everything like that. Little did I know it was actually going to be in one of my favorite music venues in Chicago, that they’re working with that music venue to use their space because it’s a much larger space. I just got to say, we had 4 people on our team from AV Chicago that were just completely professional, were just wonderful to work with. Really, the quality that we showed was 95% on them. Interestingly enough, after we were wrapping up cables and wrapping up at the end of the day, one of them came to me with some questions about AWS and Terraform, which was kind of awesome that like, hey, while they’re not a direct part of our community, they’re actually a little bit related and got something out of the conference as well, as opposed to just sitting there for about 6 to 8 hours with us.

Matty: [00:18:42] One of the things I thought was super great was we did these, like Kevin said, these fireside chats, and they literally were in front of a fake fireplace. And when we were in for the rehearsal the day before, Sasha said, can we turn this on? Is there a way to— and everyone’s kind of like, I don’t know, is there? And Sasha’s like, I’m going to figure it out. And she did. And we actually got a lot of comments saying, oh, I really love the fireplace. And there was like a little fire back there. And that was really great. I just want to speak really quick to the recording versus not, because this is a place where people have a lot of feels. And to me, it’s interesting because I think it reflects what we might call work as imagined versus work as done. So the argument for, well, if you are prerecording, they’re like, because speakers riff off each other and it’s like, I was giving this talk and then Sasha came after me and she’s like, you know, in Matty’s talk, blah, blah, blah. The reality is I have, with one exception, which was Deserted Island DevOps, in all the virtual events I’ve been a part of, I have almost never seen this happen because it happens more in the physical events. And one thing we were able to do, we were able to have the speakers in the chat during their talk with participants. And a lot of them did that. And it was, it was kind of exciting.

Sasha: [00:19:58] So I’ve done a lot of live events and I’ve done a lot of virtual events. And my own experience is that, like, I can riff off in a live event, but I’m usually not able to do that in a virtual event just because the setup is so different. And also, like what you spoke about, Kevin, is like there’s so many platforms where you don’t even know if you’re presenting the right thing. It’s just like you could spend 5 minutes being like, I hope that you are seeing the right camera and the right screen and the right everything because no one gave me any feedback and I’m just going blind in here. Right. It’s a totally different level of anxiety about what you’re doing than being on stage.

Trevor: I honestly don’t remember who came up with the idea, but we wound up using Discord to sort of facilitate the event against YouTube. What was it like to get that set up?

Matty: Yeah, it was kind of funny. Trevor, you and I kind of— it was almost parallel evolution, but really what happened was initially our theory was we’re like, okay, we kind of— again, you talk about defaulting and making assumptions. We are going to have some platform for breakouts, for video breakouts, but then we were like, and then we’ll have Slack. And as Sasha said, we looked at all these other platforms and they all kind of had something that we didn’t like. There was always something that it was just not built for the kind of open space-like dynamic participant-driven engagement. And I think I may have actually said, I think on one of our calls I said, wow, I really wish Slack had AV video calls, like video channels like Discord does. And then we went, erp, why haven’t we thought about Discord? And we, And we started going into that and started a lot of, you know, investigation. And I just want to talk just a little bit briefly, uh, there’ll be a link in the show notes. I’m writing up a blog post which will be done by the time this gets published because I control when this gets published, um, that is very much in depth of how we set up specifically Discord and the chats and things like that. But it really, uh, you know, we took a gamble, you know, with a lot of this. And that’s the one thing I want to talk about is We tried to take into account the fact that, relatively speaking, this was a low-risk event. As I said, it was free. Like, we wanted people to have a great experience, but we had the luxury of being able to take some risks and push the envelope a little bit and see what happened. And if our bets didn’t pay off, it was probably fine, but if they did, they could maybe help other events be able to think how we could kind of drive the state of the art forward.

Trevor: [00:22:32] I know you’re writing up your blog post, but what are some of the concerns that you had going in thinking about Discord as a platform?

Matty: Absolutely. So one of the things that was really key was just abuse. And that was one of the things that we actually found Discord to be pretty good at, is that compared to a lot of other platforms, there’s a lot more ability for moderation and especially for granularity of permissions. Of what people can do. In a lot of these tools, you’re either an admin or you’re nothing, right? But we were concerned about making sure there was some method that people would ostensibly agree to the code of conduct. Code of conduct is a very key part of the DevOpsDays experience, and so through help with some other communities, we found ways to create bots so that people had to agree to the code of conduct to have access. I mean, I will say that a lot of my concerns We probably got lucky. We had a fairly elaborate, at least in my head, response plan. Fun story is a couple days before the event, I was on a Zoom with Dr. Richard Cook, who’s well known in the resilience engineering community and was one of our speakers. Dr. Cook started asking me about basically, what are you going to do if everything goes to shit on Discord? I was like, well, we pretty much just turn it off then at that point. Right? And, and, but it kind of said like, we, we really were trying to think through, we know you can’t think of everything, right? Unknown unknowns, that’s resilience, adaptive capacity. But I was, yeah, I was like, what happens if someone like posts our invite link on 4chan and says, go start messing with these DevOps jerks, right? Like, what are we gonna do about that? And it didn’t happen, so that was fine, but we had a plan. We had some concerns about, you know, it’s a platform that not everybody is familiar with, and we did, we did a few things that I think we did pretty well. We recorded some how-to videos. We tried to over-rotate on onboarding. Did it work as well as we had hoped? No. But was it better than if we hadn’t done it? Probably. That’s kind of my bar for that stuff.

Trevor: [00:24:41] How did you have moderation for these rooms? You said we had video rooms, we had chat.

Matty: Yeah. What we did was for text chat, that’s kind of okay. Usually, if you think about in an in-person DevOps Days with open spaces, we tend to kind of let those things go. People know, they know how to help us. We walk around, we go from room to room. In the virtual one, we were a little more concerned that there might be a greater chance of a code of conduct problem, ’cause people tend to err that way a little more in the virtual space than they might in person. And what we did was we recruited a ton of volunteers from across the DevOpsDays community, and which to help us be moderators. And it was actually really cool because this let us bring in folks from the DevOpsDays organization, literally around the world, who normally probably wouldn’t be able to come to DevOpsDays Chicago. They would love to, but— and engage with us as well as that happened. We did a bunch of— kind of the idea was that it was kind of like moderating or facilitating a meeting at work a little bit, right? The facilitators and moderators were there, obviously, to look out for code of conduct, but also try to help make sure you didn’t have one person dominating the conversation and things of that nature. And going back to Sasha’s earlier point about those of us that were in the on-site team pretty much didn’t experience this part, so I couldn’t tell you how well it worked. And that’s why I want to like talk to Kat for a minute, who was one of our moderators and also is the biggest Discord expert in my life. So anytime I have questions about Discord, I’m just like, Kat, how do I do this? And she’s like, all right, boomer, let me tell you.

Kat: [00:26:25] I would never explicitly call you a boomer. A boomer is a state of mind, not just an age group. And I have not personally seen you do anything particularly boomery, but if you did pull a boomer strat, I would call you out on that.

Matty: I would like to point out that I am technically not a boomer. You’re kind of the silent— It’s only in Discord. I’m the forgotten generation. I’m the Gen X. You remember we exist.

Trevor: It’s not fun when the age thing comes into play, is it?

Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Kat, you were one of our moderators, so you participated as a participant, as everyone did, but also helped out as a moderator. And what was— you know, you’ve been to a bunch of these real-world events and things like that. Like, tell me a little bit about your take on how this went.

Kat: I have done something like, I don’t know, 25, 30 virtual conferences this year. And I have to say that DevOps Days Chicago was probably one of my favorites because it was run through Discord. Discord allows a level of, like, friendly, genuine, and, I don’t know, easier communication with not just the other attendees but with the speakers than a lot of virtual event platforms do, in my experience. I’ve tried, like, I’ve been involved in conferences running on like 4 different like paid virtual event platforms, and Discord is just, it’s just easier for me as an attendee. I don’t know if it’s easier to run from a conference organizer standpoint, but it’s easy as a moderator. It’s easier to administrate for me. And like, if DEF CON can pull it off with tens of thousands of attendees, than anybody should be able to, in my opinion. It was easier to talk to people, easier to handle it when there was a problem. There’s voice and video that works really well, and has to, because, I don’t know, I mostly use it for gaming, but I really enjoyed it. I would like to see more conferences run through Discord.

Matty: [00:28:35] So what we did, for a little bit of background, is during, like, we talked about how we had those fireside chats, like, after the talk. Same time is when we had topic breakout rooms, which would be similar. I very intentionally did not call them open spaces because they sort of technically weren’t, but if you’ve been to a DevOpsDays with open spaces, that’s the spirit of what we were trying to do, was attendee-driven content. And so people could suggest a topic they wanted to talk about. We created the rooms. There were both either a text room or a video room that they could join. So in the video rooms, in the breakout rooms, again, I’m asking this, I actually literally haven’t talked to anybody about this yet, and the event was like 3 weeks ago. Like, what was it like? Like, walk me through a couple that you were in either as a moderator or participant, and like, how do you— what was it like to have that experience?

Kat: It was really, really cool. Like in an in-person conference, sometimes there were people who just like weren’t comfortable actually speaking or engaging, and they just just kind of want to listen, and that’s fine. From time to time, that did mean that I, as a moderator, had to act more as a facilitator of conversation than ruling with an iron fist to make sure that nobody did a CoC violation. But that’s okay. I’m a developer advocate. That’s like, that’s part of my job in general. Like, I get paid for that. So it was not a problem when that happened, and usually there was at least 2 or 3 people in the room who were like very comfortable having a conversation with strangers, much like in an open space at an actual conference. And one time it was, it was hopping, and I didn’t have to say anything at any point. It, it really did feel like as close to being at an in-person conference with like real breakout rooms as I’ve gotten so far. It was, it was nice. I missed human interaction, and it was nice to— it was good to have it, even when I did have to like hard control the conversation. But even doing that was not difficult, and the attendees seemed to love it too. Like, once you asked a good enough question to get people rolling, it basically self-managed for like 15 or 20 minutes until they ran the extent of that conversation. You had to come come up with something else. So people seem to really love it.

Matty: [00:31:05] And this is also, I think, that the virtual breakouts and, you know, was sort of a good example of how you have to iterate and respond, because back to the, like, we can make all the plans we want. So I spent a bunch of time kind of like saying, this is how I think we will do this. And it seems that, you know, again, no plan survives contact with reality. And very quickly during the day, in the beginning of the day, I was noticing things happening that were counter to my vision.

Trevor: They had to take Matt’s phone and laptop away.

Matty: Yeah, they did. Yeah, I kind of jumped in and was like, what are you doing? No, no, no! And Trevor, like, ran up to me and snatched my phone out of my hand and—

Chris: There was great rejoicing in the virtual team when that happened.

Matty: I’m sure there was.

Trevor: Well, then we’re going to switch gears. Let’s talk to one of our speakers.

Chris: Hey, Laura.

Trevor: I’m going to put you on now. Hi.

Jason: How are you?

Laura: [00:32:06] I’m all right.

Kat: How are you?

Trevor: I’m doing well, or as well as one can be this year. That’s fair. What can you tell us about your speaker experience this year? You were an Ignite speaker this year?

Laura: I was an Ignite speaker this year, and so I will say that Ignites are like my favorite way of speaking because they’re so challenging and it’s really fun to just try to distill a message down to 5 minutes or less. It was really weird because, so unlike a lot of the speakers, I actually recorded it in my own home.

Jason: And so you had to deal with my guide.

Laura: I did have to deal with your guide. It was actually really good. I’m going to just give you that feedback right now. No, I’m not doing it just to stroke your ego, but it actually was really good. But I think we might have gone a little overboard. So I have an engineer in the house aside from me, but like he actually has an engineering degree. And so we literally taped a sheet up to reflect light off of. So I think I posted a picture up to Twitter and it shows like we had the sheet taped to a coat rack on the wall with a ridiculous amount of blue painter’s tape so we didn’t mar anything. And we had the light from the garage flashing the light and like It was a little crazy. I was just going to record it right here in my office, and then he was like, no, let’s take it downstairs. Let’s make it really fancy. That was an experience, mostly because as an Ignite, typically it’s just like, okay, go up on stage, do it once. That’s all the time you got. You can’t redo it. Now, all of a sudden, I had to redo it like 10 times, mostly because we had cars that kept driving past outside of the window right nearby. I wasn’t going to make somebody have to edit those out, So like I kept on having to time it, and then right as like the 4-minute mark, a car went by and we’re like, all right, from the top, let’s do this again. So it was definitely an experience for sure. I really enjoyed it.

Trevor: [00:34:05] Next time I will include notes that multiple takes is okay and we can totally edit it together, no problem.

Laura: Yeah, but I mean, that car sound of like whoosh outside of your window doesn’t really work out too well. To edit that out. It’s a little messy.

Trevor: Well, I mean, if you’ve got multiple takes and as long as the car isn’t literally exactly passing at the 4-minute mark every time because you hired somebody to drive by at the 4-minute mark every time.

Laura: Well, but then I’d have like this weird dubbed thing because you would have to have the videos make sense, but my mouth will be moving and it’ll just be like a different set of words going by.

Trevor: That was why we called for 2 camera angles so that we could do cuts.

Laura: Yeah, I’ll tell you, probably the, the one thing that was actually the hardest wasn’t actually giving the talk. It was handing off this inflatable mic thing. So, okay, they had this idea to make the Ignites feel more like an Ignite, and it was taking an inflatable mic— we all got shipped these inflatable mics— and we had to take an inflatable mic and then hand it off to the next person. Well, I had a slight problem I was right up against a wall on my left. There was no way anyone in the household could sneak around the camera to hand me a mic and then get past it without making lots of lovely stomping noises as you’re trying to climb over cables and stuff because of this wonderful setup that we manufactured. So what you can’t see, I was the first Ignite. I had to reach over and I had balanced the mic on top of of an old camera stand. And I had to make it look like someone handed it to me, which was awkward. And then when I handed it off, no one could be over there either because my mic was really sensitive. So we had to make this huge pile of cloth. So just lots of blankets on the floor so that it looks like I’m handing it off, but literally I’m just dropping it on the floor. And I kept looking to see where it went. And so we had to keep taking the retake of me handing the mic off because I kept trying to drop it without looking at it. And then the dogs decided, oh look, blankets, we’re gonna lay on them. And so they were just like, why are you dropping stuff on me? And then there was thunking noises and it was always very hilarious.

Sasha: [00:36:21] So, oh my God, how many takes did you do?

Laura: So I mean, for a 5-minute Ignite, this was a little crazy because I had lots of practice in, of course, because that’s what I do. And then I think we probably took like 15 takes just for a 5-minute Ignite for it to be proper because of the cars next door. Or like the cars right outside my window, and trying to not look at the mic as I’m dropping it. I think both of us were a little annoyed by the time it ended.

Sasha: I was particularly proud of myself throwing the mic the first time. You did! I did with a solemn face, and I think that worked.

Matty: Laura was very integral to quite a few moments that had to do with the inflatable mic. So one was because I happened to be talking to her when they arrived at my house, And I— or no, no, it actually was even before they— I think they arrived, but I hadn’t opened them, which is actually a key part of this story. And so I was like, oh my God, I have to— like, we wanted to surprise all the speakers, but I was like, Laura, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell somebody about it. And I was like—

Laura: so excited.

Matty: [00:37:21] I was very excited. And so I sent her a link to the Amazon page. And so what we had done is they were inflatable mics. It was a set of 5, and they were in different colors. And so because we knew we wanted to have every Ignite speaker have a consistent color, you know, I was like, okay, I need to order a bunch because I couldn’t just order to get enough mics because they would be different colors. So as I’m looking at this, I see that it says colors are random, which meant my theory of ordering 5 would get me 5 of each color was incorrect. Fortunately, when I did go and I was able to consolidate enough to have consistency. But one of the things that happened was Laura said, oh, maybe it’d be funny is at the end if I like throw it at the camera or drop it or whatever. And I said, Laura, Sarah, you don’t need to manufacture a moment. Someone’s gonna eff this up anyway. And yeah, there were going on the wrong hand, like, it all— it was— it could not have been more of my dream of the comedy of the inflatable mic.

Laura: [00:38:22] I think, though, to me, like, it was really fun to, like, hand it off and not know what the next person was going to do, like, how it was gonna look to them or what was gonna happen. And it’s really funny because I look like I’m handing it way off, off screen because I had to drop it and I didn’t want people realizing I had to drop it. And the next person person, I forget exactly who was after me, but they just got it handed to them. Like, you saw this hand come in and hand to them, and I think you could even see the person’s body who was handing it to them. And I was like, this looks hilarious, just is really funny. And I think that really helped that feeling of an Ignite where there’s, there’s hilarious moments, there’s sad moments, there’s really, really poignant moments. And but mainly it’s just about doing something a little bit crazy to catch everyone’s attention.

Trevor: What was it like as a speaker to watch your talk and be in chat at the same time?

Laura: Oh, that was probably the most nerve-wracking part. Like, so in case anybody ever thinks that, like, people who speak all the time aren’t ever nervous, that’s a lie. I don’t think there’s any speaker who would say, oh, I’m never nervous on stage. It’s terrifying enough, but to then have to watch yourself and watch the facial expressions you make, because I make some really ridiculous facial expressions and I don’t realize it. To have to watch yourself doing that and answer people’s questions at the same time, that is— I’m more nervous about doing that than doing it live, to be honest with you. But it was really fun to be able to be part of the entire discussion. I did help moderate some, but just to be part of the whole discussion all day, that was that participants— like, you are a participant discussion, like, from the original DevOps Days Chicago specifically. But like, that was the experience the entire time. So I don’t think anyone really missed out on a hallway track because they could pull me aside, quote unquote, to ask me a question at any time in Discord. And I think that was probably fantastic, though a little nerve-wracking when you have to watch yourself.

Matty: [00:40:27] We had another, another speaker who’s on the call with us is Jason, who was one of our non-Ignite speakers. And I wanna talk a little bit about, and Jason also recorded in the studio and participated in having a fireside chat. One thing that’s kind of fun is, so Jason, your recording from the studio was pretty much the first one we got and we were so excited. You know, we’re like, oh, this is real, look at how good. And then we’re also like, wait, why is he sitting down?

Jason: That was a bit interesting. Yeah, because when I went to the studio, it was just already set up. They had, you know, the videographer had set everything up. And so I was like, well, I guess there’s no podium. It’s really like this black cube sitting on the ground. Like, so I might as well just sit because I can’t really stand. That was such an interesting experience. I mean, partly because, you know, the options were record it myself like Laura did, which is like, well, I know the standards that the Chicago team has, and so I’m like, well, if you’re pushing for a pro videographer, let’s do it. But then the options are, they come into your house, and I’m like, yeah, that’s kind of scary and weird, or you go to a studio, which this one actually turned out to be by the train tracks in kind of a sketchy area, so that was always kind of weird.

Matty: [00:41:53] Jason was our last talk of the day, and we haven’t talked about the DevOps Yak at all so far. And just for background, if you don’t know, you know, our mascot is a yak and we have a ridiculous yak costume. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about how that came into play. But what was happening is when you were watching the stream, you know, like Kevin said, we brought the speakers in on a Zoom call who would then be talking to the emcees, me and Sasha, me and Margaret, Sasha and Margaret, whatever. And what we did for Jason is we decided to have, when the camera came up, instead of Sasha sitting there with me, it was me and the DevOps Yak. And if you’d like to see what that looks like, if you go to maddie.wtf/yak-wtf, it’ll take you right to the part of the stream where you can see it. We had thought about trying to surprise Jason with it, but that seemed like that might have created a bit more challenge. But as far as having that fireside chat after Yak notwithstanding, did that feel a little more like it wasn’t just a prerecorded talk that you had done and then just sort of showed up for? Like, how did that feel like as a speaker? You had a great recording and then you still had some work to do.

Jason: [00:43:10] Yeah, I mean, I think that was the nice thing about it, right, is like, because when you are watching a recording, as Laura mentioned, it is the worst watching yourself on a video. And so having— getting to break away from that, so I didn’t actually have to watch all of me because I had to log off early and then join the call with you. It was a nice little break, and it was nice to be able to chat with you about a few things beforehand and just kind of reset the tone, I guess, rather than watching this horrible video of myself and then immediately jumping into questions. I think one of the interesting things is because I was the last speaker of the day, you and Sasha were exhausted. Like, I mean, simply the fact of having the yak there and you were like hanging out, you were pretty delirious. And so I feel like everything was hilarious and everything was just like in slow-mo, uh, as far as like your reactions to things, which was pretty awesome.

Sasha: [00:44:13] I was actually kind of like pissed off about how that particular conversation went because like, you’re right, we were just kind of like done, you know. And then just— and we also know you, so it’s like, it’s harder to maintain professional, you know, posture while you’re doing that. So yeah, I—

Matty: but I was kind of okay because I feel like that shows a human element, right? And everybody knows it’s the end of the day. We might have over-rotated on it a little bit.

Jason: Yeah, but I mean, that’s the thing about this, right? Everyone thinks this idea that, oh, I’m at a virtual conference, it’s not really real, or this idea that virtual conferences are so much less work because you don’t have a venue and all this stuff, but it’s like the amount of exertion, like visibly, that you can see in the video of you guys actually just being there is— you can tell that you’re both exhausted because it is— there’s a ton of work involved in all of this.

Sasha: And I will also say that, so we were there live, and so it was more, a little bit more of a live experience than, you know, usually. But I have done virtual events that were like, you know, the typical Zoom call type, and you still like really, really exhausted by the end of the day. So it kind of works in the same way. I actually would say that you’re more exhausted when you do the Zoom call conference because you don’t have that, you know, 5 minutes that you chat with a friend and, you know, grab a coffee and whatever and just recharge.

Jason: [00:45:41] So especially when the yak is— especially when the yak is sitting in your chair, you just can’t rest anywhere.

Matty: And one thing I wanna ask you about too, Jason, and this was a thought kind of when you talk about an unintended benefit, is I realized right around the time we did the event, I said, one of the things, you know, we kind of kept talking about how we wanted to do the recordings, and it was all about like the benefit to the conference. And I sat there and I said, you know what, if I was a speaker, boy, would I love to have a really, really good copy of a talk that I gave. And I’m— so that was kind of an unintentional speaker gift gift, knowing that it’s not the same length and we kind of shortened you up a little bit, like, what do you feel like— like, how is this gonna help you, this experience, and anything like that, like, kind of going forward in your travails as either an organizer of events, as you are, or a speaker? Like, what did you get out of this?

Jason: [00:46:41] Obviously, as you mentioned, having a really, really nice video is definitely a huge benefit. For those who haven’t spoken at an event, oftentimes what happens is there’s an open call for proposals and you submit, and they always ask you, submit a video of you talking. And it’s, you know, if you don’t have one, then you’re like, I don’t know what to submit. Maybe I’ll record something on my phone. And then they evaluate that. Having something really nice that shows your presence, like a video like this, is amazing just for that. On top of the fact that, you know, you can just share it. So I think that’s a huge benefit. In terms of being an organizer, I don’t know what the benefit is, because I think you just upped the bar that it’s just like super high now. And so I’m just always gonna feel like crap whenever I do anything for an event. So I think that’s a detriment, Matty.

Matty: I’m— I’ll take that. I’ve said before that if I were to summarize most of the feedback that I saw on Twitter and from attendees, it could be summarized as, I hate virtual events, I still hate virtual events, but if we have to have them, this is what I would like them to be like. I don’t even know what the virtual part was like, like Sasha said.

Chris: [00:47:57] I was amazed personally at how much more draining it was doing the virtual stuff at the backend compared to a normal in-person conference. It was just, I felt like I had to be wired all the time to keep it, keep an eye on what was happening in all the different channels. So to kind of give you an idea of what was happening in the background, what we were doing was we’d create— probably the biggest thing apart from just making sure that people were able to log in, handling questions, kind of building up an FAQ as the questions were coming up, was prepping the breakout rooms and getting getting the breakout chat rooms going and the breakout video rooms going. And so kind of trying to keep all these balls in the air at the same time was taxing because there’s context switching all the time.

Jason: The breakout rooms are really interesting.

Trevor: Those seem to be, you know, from what I could see watching them populate, they seem to be pretty well attended. How are you gathering the topics?

Chris: [00:49:02] So what we had right at the beginning was we had a breakout proposal channel where people could type in proposals for breakouts and things like that. But for the very first breakout session, a lot of people didn’t really know that it was there. They hadn’t engaged it even though we had Matt and Sasha kind of on the livestream say, hey, you know, this is there, go and start proposing topics and stuff like that. So for the first round, we basically reseeded it with what moderators wanted to talk about. And I got one of my favorite topics in there, bare metal DevOps. What we would do is people would just vote a ton of emojis for which breakouts they wanted to do. And then we would create— we had a private area where we’d create the channels. Because one of the things specifically with the video channels is there was a limit on 25 users in there. So what we needed to make sure that we had before we went live with the breakout video channels specifically was make sure that the moderator was in place so that we would have someone with moderator rights have a slot in there to basically enforce the CoC and all the rest. And so we kind of I had to get that pre-populated before it went. Once moderator was in the room, we would then drag it out to public access and let people join it. The interesting thing for me was that very first round of breakouts, I was moderating the bare metal DevOps one. The key thing for me was we’d see— there were 2 interesting things that I wasn’t prepared for. There were a lot of people connecting and And then hopping out and then connecting and then kind of hopping out. And so I think there was a lot of people who were unfamiliar with Discord and who weren’t quite sure what to do. And the other problem was that no one was turning on their cameras. And so people would connect and they would stay, and then you couldn’t see if people could hear you. People didn’t want to talk. And so it took us a good 5, 6 minutes to try and get people to start talking and to start kind of asking questions, engaging, and kind of trying to just get things going. So for me, that very first breakout session was a lot of hard work trying to get things going. But thankfully, as the day progressed, people got used to it. The other rooms that I was in later on in the day were a lot easier to deal with.

Trevor: [00:51:15] What was it like coordinating with the other organizers behind the scenes too, as well as the moderators?

Chris: It was great. So we had a separate channel for organizers and then another channel for moderators. And it was initially a bit frantic. We had Jerry, who was kind of the ringmaster for most of the— well, for the entire Beck virtual team. And so Jerry was, was kind of trying to keep everyone, kind of make sure that the primary roles were filled and knew what people were doing. There was a lot of communication of, okay, we’re going to set up the channels. And then, you know, for the first couple of breakout rooms, you know, I was looking after making sure that we had moderators lined up for the breakouts for both the that the moderators could connect if the moderators had issues. We had other people within the virtual teams who were just fielding ad hoc help requests that were coming in from people. And then based on some of those help requests that came through, we were updating the FAQ live. We had like a read-only FAQ channel where we had basically popped a few bits and pieces. Like one of the things that came in early in the FAQ was, you know, what are these breakout rooms? How do I propose a breakout channel? And so that was one thing that we added into the FAQ. And so, you know, we had a good breakup of tasks there as well. But then it was also a bit of cross-checking between people, like, you know, how, how were people engaging within the breakout rooms? You know, were there any tips or tricks that we could have or kind of pointers that we could give each other between moderators and organizers to try and keep things moving and keep things kind of engaged within the breakout rooms?

Trevor: [00:53:02] I think one other question would be, how did you deal with folks who had issues getting into Discord? Did you run into that much?

Chris: We didn’t have as much as we expected. So we did see a few people kind of connect in, and I suppose that’s one thing— I don’t remember it being a problem, but we did keep an eye initially on the numbers of, okay, people who joined the room, so kind of they’d connected to the server, but then what they couldn’t do is we’d see they, like, they were in the room, just hanging out and there was a couple of connections that connected to the room and just hung out all day without actually clicking on the yes, I accept the code of conduct so I can receive it so I can participate in the conference. So a few people hit that. So I don’t know kind of what happened there. That’s kind of the way we had the system set up though, is like people couldn’t really engage or communicate until they’d done that. So I think I seem to recall we kind of opened up the help a little bit. But yeah, overall we didn’t get any emails to the organizers’ emailing list around problems connecting. So from our perspective, if people were having issues, we didn’t hear about it.

Matty: [00:54:14] So the issues didn’t happen then. Totally cool.

Chris: We didn’t observe it, therefore it did not occur.

Matty: That’s right. I think it would be great to kind of take a few minutes just thinking about, you know, we all experienced this event in different ways. And I think we all have some fun stories or thoughts or things that really stood out. And one of the things I’ll just say before we kind of go into that is we didn’t even talk about the sponsor experience. So to be honest, you’re just gonna have to go to the show notes, click on the link to the blog that I’m gonna write, and that will tell you all about how sponsors were set up and the experiments we took with them. It was definitely a different experience when it comes to that. I think the one thing that comes to mind for me, I still go back to this unfortunate 2 different events happening at the same time. Because one of the things that was really powerful to me is while we were distanced and masked and taking all the proper precautions in the studio, I feel like it was pretty amazing to be able to run DevOps Days Chicago with my co-organizers, and then likewise feeling really kind of cruddy that more than half the team wasn’t there for that part, but they had their own event they did. And then they got to do fun things we didn’t get to do. But I, I, I think the, the one thing, a story I want to tell a little bit, is there’s some traditions about DevOps Days Chicago, and one of those traditions is that Josh Zimmerman always gives a funny Ignite. And I feel bad for Josh because he keeps trying to pitch like real talks to us, and we’re like, no, no, no, no, no, we need you to come and do something funny again for us. And maybe one year we’ll let Josh actually teach us something. But one of the things we realized was By having this virtual stream, we had all this space for content. And we had Josh— Josh did an Ignite a few years ago called, you know, DevOps Deep Thoughts by Not Jack Handy. And we had him record a bunch of those, and they played throughout the day. And I think fun little things like that add to the experience of it, right? It’s not just a bunch of talks. It’s a whole event.

Kevin: [00:56:26] And as far as, you know, we’re not talking too much about the sponsors, like, I feel like that was a really important part of our sponsorship. You know, the most obvious thing for a physical and virtual event for sponsors that’s the same is the, like, minute pitch or whatever it is. At this point, we allowed our sponsors to have a 3-minute pitch, which is longer than usual, and any video they wanted, and many use it in different ways. But we also intentionally sandwich them between 2 deep DevOps thoughts, because after someone saw the first one, they’re like, it hopefully became the thing you didn’t want to miss, which I hope drove more, you know, eyes and thus more value over to our sponsors.

Chris: One of the things that I had to juggle early on with the, with the virtual team was Matt kindly organized to get stickers made for us, for speakers and organizers, of our little avatars. And so what had happened was that Matt and me and a few others had kind of set our avatar within the Discord channel to those stickers. And then all of a sudden the speakers spotted them. It’s like, those speakers are cool. And so pretty much I was spending like the first—

Matty: [00:57:36] I think it was Laura.

Chris: Was it Laura that spotted it the first time?

Kat: That was me.

Chris: Yeah. Awesome. And so I was like, okay, hunting on our shared Google Drive for where we actually had the files for those, and then trying to find out the easiest way to actually get all the speakers access to their files and all the rest. And that was so much fun. But the best thing is that I I then stuck my little speaker on the back of my laptop and my kids saw it. My oldest looked at me and was like, oh, are you going to go full Inception on this and kind of redo your— because I still had some of the spare. It’s got a picture of us with the laptop on us, and then the DevOps Days Chicago brain logo, and then a square yak sticker that we actually haven’t made yet. My son was like, oh, are we going to go Inception on this? I’m like, yeah, pulled out the brain stickers, and we need to get the square yak stickers printed out so we can go all the way on our laptop.

Laura: That probably was the best speaker gift I’ve ever gotten. I know that like there’s, there’s nicer ones that people have sent, like, you know, whatever random stuff for— at events I’ve gotten different things, but I can’t explain how much a little sticker means because it’s me. It’s literally me, and it’s just like, wow, someone took the time and drew me, and, and now I have like a sticker I can put on my laptop. And you didn’t just send one. I have to say, that was probably the best part. I now have a collection, so I’m not afraid to put it on something so that I know I have it for later. So yeah, I just had to chime in. Those stickers are just really awesome.

Chris: [00:59:07] So yeah, that’s awesome. I’d never actually stuck a sticker on my laptop ever before in my life until I got that sticker. That’s the first laptop I’ve ever stuck on a laptop. So yeah, props, Maddie.

Laura: Give a shout out.

Sasha: Chris, you’ve never Have you ever had a sticker on your laptop?

Chris: I’ve always on principle refused to stick any sticker on my laptops. I even have an issue with the kind of asset tagging barcode sticker on a laptop. It just kind of makes me squirm.

Matty: So I wanna give just a shout out. Those stickers were designed and created by Kelly Mahoney @SoSplush on Twitter. So, and we decided to do it because traditionally, like last year, we did professional headshots for all of our speakers, and then we realized we couldn’t do that year. So we thought, what if we did the little avatar stickers of them?

Jason: So, so I actually did get professional headshots this year because my videographer was like, hey, don’t leave yet. I’m also a photographer. I’m gonna do some headshots for you, which I thought was pretty awesome. I think the thing about the stickers that I love is—

Matty: [01:00:10] did we pay for that?

Jason: I guess. But I think the thing about the stickers, right, is everyone always, like conference organizers, having done this a bunch, you’re like, what do I get the speakers? And it’s naturally, it’s that thing of like when you’re doing Christmas gifts for family members where it’s like, you know, there’s the people that shop for like, what does my family member need? What does my family member want? Like things like that. And we’re all, we work in tech. So like if there’s things we really want, we generally just buy it. Like we’re the worst people to shop for. At least that’s what my ex-wife always told me. The stickers were great because it’s not something that you thought of. You obviously don’t need it, but it brought a ton of joy.

Kevin: I’ve got a couple of fun things that were my favorite part about DevOps Days this year. The first is, since we had the studio in Chicago where we recorded a bunch of our local presenters, we ended up with a little extra studio time, so we brought the yak in and just put it in front of the green screen and hit record. We ended up with something like 25 minutes of footage of the yak doing various dances, various poses, and so on. And part of that recording was for a promo video that Trevor and I put together, which you should go check out in the show notes as well. But my favorite thing was what I call the Trevor idea, which is Trevor has these crazy off-the-wall ideas all the time. And about half of the time they work out and half the time they don’t, which is fine. But of the half that work, I’d say half of them I’m all in for, and the other half I’m always like, I don’t know, man. That seems like a lot of effort for just a little bit of payoff. And I was in that kind of zone when he told me, I’m going to take all this green screen footage and make all of the, like, we’ll be right yak and like, welcome to DevOps Days and thanks for watching kind of things out of all of this footage. And he spent hours upon hours dealing with the green screen issues, pulling in old photos from other DevOps Days. And I was just not convinced it was going to be worth it. And I’ll tell you, it was 100% worth it.

Matty: [01:02:18] I can’t tell you how many comments and tweets I saw where people thought that the yak was live and was actually reacting and responding to what was happening, which is a testament to how humans put patterns together whether they are there or not. But yeah, no, those were— and I remember the same thing, Kevin. Like, Trevor would be like, oh, let me show you what I did. And I was like, damn. So good job, Trevor.

Sasha: I will say I didn’t— I want to go back and watch the entire stream and I didn’t, but I think like those little bits of like Dev Sleep Thoughts and the Yak videos were a major improvement over just, you know, sort of running dry content on a stream.

Jason: They were very much in the spirit of DevOps Days Chicago, right? Like, without it, it would have been a great conference, but it could have been any conference. And with the Yak, and with DevOps Deep Thoughts, everything else, it was very much DevOpsDays Chicago.

Sasha: [01:03:18] We need to think about taking it to the next level. We’ve taken the yak pretty much as far as the yak goes, and we need new ideas now to make it more ridiculous.

Kat: I’ve got to say that I’ve never been to DevOpsDays Chicago, but the small things that went wrong in the background, like awkwardness shuffling moderators between breakout rooms, like panicking to figure out what the breakout topics were gonna be because people weren’t actually suggesting things. They made it feel more like a normal conference than other virtual events. Like virtual event platforms often, like they go so hard on making sure that absolutely everything is perfect that like you don’t see it when something goes wrong because it’s managed by like some offsite events person at a virtual platform company who’s babysitting the drama for you, but that’s not realistic. At actual conferences, stuff goes wrong. There’s weirdness. There’s some awkward AV problem. The speaker is late, or people are weird in a breakout room and won’t have a conversation. Those things continuing to go wrong at DevOpsDays Chicago like it’s a real conference are are what really made it feel, I don’t know, more normal for me. It felt more normal for a day, which is extremely valuable right now.

Trevor: [01:04:47] Head on over to arresteddevops.com/devopstage-chicago-2020 for this episode’s show notes. Visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes store. If you want to help other people find the podcast. Matt is going to touch on a review of his favorite in a moment, but we’re also apparently on Spotify and iHeartRadio if you’re into those systems too.

Matty: Find us anywhere fine podcasts are located. I do want to read just a little bit from one review that we got a few months ago that really touched me. I’m not going to read the entire review, but just a couple of things. The review says, I have a strange place in this world. I’m not in the tech sector, but I want to move I’m a nurse. I will admit I’ve been around as long as technology. Well, not really. I’ve seen some shit, and I was taught years ago before the advent of Windows to disassemble and reassemble hardware. I know about tape drives and rooms with climate control. I’ve progressed with technology, and I genuinely believe that being— that what happens in tech innovation also happens in other parts of the world. I recognize there’s a world bigger than me out there. Arrested DevOps has helped me really embrace these things in a way I never expected. For example, I could tell Matt that I’m a sysadmin at heart and he would probably say bullshit, but in the best possible way. I started listening to episodes from number 1, but about 2 years in, I fast-forwarded to the present. I look at the early episodes as historical documents. Whether you are in healthcare or strictly IT, this podcast is gold. Comments and reviews and things like this are really what keep us going. It’s really fun. Like a good example, this was, this was a super fun episode. We basically sat around for an hour and talked to friends about fun stuff. And I’m not going to lie, that’s a great part of doing this show. But the reason that we keep doing this year over year and have done this for 7 years, for longer than there’s been a DevOps Days Chicago even, is because of things like that, because of ways that, that we found that the show has helped people. And that means a lot. And speaking of meaning a lot, everybody on this episode, This episode has meant a lot to me, just for this event and in a lot of other ways. I want to thank you all for joining us for this supersized episode of Arrested DevOps. As always, I am Matt, @MattStratton.

Trevor: [01:07:15] I’m Trevor, @TrevorGHess. This is Arrested DevOps.

Matty: Remember, there’s always DevOps. In the banana stand.

Chris: You say banana, I say banana. Say it right.